Obama and Congress Support Foreign Workers Over Americans

by Leigh Bravo1/6/16
Happy New Year America! While you were out celebrating the passage of the new year, President Obama was busy signing another Executive Order that increases the number of Foreign Workers allowed in the United States. He has once again, bypassed Congress and is breaking quotas established by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952.

Before the New Year, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that dramatically increased the supply of H-2B foreign workers to fill construction, hospitality, truck driving and other blue-collar jobs. Although it does not allow increases over the current 66,000 cap, it does extend the length of their stays, further hindering the job market for blue-collar workers. Now President Obama, though his executive action, will offer extensions and increases to the H-1B foreign worker program. It will grant work permits to foreign workers who are in the country on a temporary work visa and offer them green cards. It would also extend the length of work permits for foreign STEM students.

So while Congress and the President seem to believe that jobs are so abundant that we can offer them up to foreign workers, the facts point to a job market that is less than favorable for American citizens.

The U.S. graduates twice as many students with STEM degrees as are hired in STEM occupations.

Two thirds of entry-level hires in the tech industry are now going to foreign workers.

92 million Americans have dropped out of the workforce due to a lack of jobs.

2.8 million college educated graduates will enter the workforce this year, yet represent 40% of the unemployed.

We have been in the longest sustained period of unemployment since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting their data following World War II.

Manufacturing jobs have fallen.

More businesses are closing their doors than opening.

Examples of how this program is being used to undercut American workers are becoming mainstream. Recently, Southern California Edison laid off hundreds of loyal employees and forced them to train H-1B guest workers hired to replace them. Disney also laid off hundreds of employees but not before requiring them to train their H1B replacements. Microsoft laid off over 18,000 U.S workers while lobbying Washington for an increase in H1B visas. Toys “R” Us, New York Life Insurance Company, Engage Learning, Intel, and others have displaced thousands of workers in lieu of cheaper, unskilled foreign workers.

Tata and Infosys are two of the largest recipients of H1-B visas, receiving more than 12,400 new visas in 2013 alone. Tata paid 29.8 million to settle a federal class action bought by 12,800 outsourced workers for mistreatement and Infosys paid $34 million to settle federal charges that it had defrauded immigration authorities. The H1B program has been and continues to be used as a scam for outsourcing firms and their U.S. clients; firing older, more experienced workers in lieu of cheaper foreign workers.

Senator Jeff Sessions has singled out presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s I-Squared bill, which triples the number of H1B visas issued in the United States. Sessions asked why Congress would ever consider

“Advancing legislation that provides jobs for the citizens of other countries at the expense of our own?”

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft testified before Congress,

“Our higher education system doesn’t produce enough top scientists and engineers to meet the needs of the U.S. economy.”

Gates suggested that we should allow corporations to hire an ‘infinite’ number of H-1B workers.

While Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are pushing for unlimited H1B visas, people like Christine Miller, an American born MIT Graduate with 20 years of research experience with Johns Hopkins is laid off because of funding cuts. Sona Shah, another American born worker with degrees in physics and engineering, was laid off by a computer company that was simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas. Figures from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are indicating that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the U.S. are unemployed or underemployed.

Does the United States actually have a shortage of qualified workers or is our government selling us down the proverbial garden path in favor of their biggest supporters….the corporate bottom line?

11 Responses to Obama and Congress Support Foreign Workers Over Americans

I’m not surprised. I wonder if 71% of these H1B will take a page from the illegal community.
I’m also curious if B Hussein Shithead will “pick up the phone” and get our marine outta Mexico. (Not really too curious.)

I doubt the GOP actually prefers foreign workers to American ones (though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Demagogues do). However, they do prefer the big donations of the Cheap Labor Lobby, so it amounts to the same thing. Note that merely increasing the labor supply massively, at a time of employment stagnation, leads to a reduced cost of labor — or, in other words, lower wages and fringe benefits.

I think the clique’ at the top of the GOP doesn’t give a damn about American workers. And as you say, their actions support the will of the Cheap Labor Lobby so they are actively against the American worker.

Another point which should be made is that the massive import of cheap labor is not only pushing down wages and creating unemployment among American workers. It is pushing up the cost of government for everyone as those millions of Americans who have lost their jobs or who are working for lower wages are taking food stamps, SSI and other government payments which they would not be able to if they were working full time for higher wages.

But the Cheap Labor Lobby doesn’t care about this because a large percentage of this extra cost is picked up by the middle class who are finding it harder to make ends meet. The amount of extra money which the members of the Cheap Labor Lobby are putting in their pockets is larger than the extra costs they are absorbing for the extra welfare costs their actions result in.

For example, say Jeff Zuckerberg replaces those expensive American workers for cheaper foreign workers and Facebook saves US$50 million per year, which goes to the bottom line. With a p/e of about 75 (2014 number) the value of Facebook stock increases by US$3.75 billion dollars. That’s some incentive for bringing in foreign workers. I think Googles p/e was about 35 for 2014 so they would only increase their stock value by about US$1.75 billion in my theoretical calculation.

With a p/e of only about 20, one wonders why Disney even bothered replacing 250 workers with foreigners. The effect on their stock price was probable only a couple of hundred million.

This p/e multiplier effect is also a big reason many large corporations would actually like to have the government take over healthcare insurance. They would like to have that cost off their books and again, go to the bottom line which would increase the company equities enormously.

Most businessmen are concerned not with the business climate in general, but how they do compared to their competition. So if the business climate is greatly worsened, but their competitors are hurt worse, then they consider it a good thing.

We have been lied to for years with the old “jobs that Americans won’t do” canard. Truck driving, construction, tech, these are all good jobs. Toys-R Us has to bring in foreigners to fill jobs? The only reason you can’t find anyone willing to stock shelves and work at the check out is that they are making more on the dole. As for those positions where Americans must train their foreign replacements before they are laid off, I guess it’s because those Americans were about to decide to “take this job and shove it!”

Another “benefit” of high native unemployment is that even more youngsters will go to college (whether they are suited to it or not) just to have something to do. As the general public is beginning to realize that a college degree is no longer all it’s cracked up to be, the Progressives are pushing for universal college education. Could it be because an increasing number of colleges and universities are becoming an extension of the K-12 indoctrination system?

Have any of the candidates had anything to say concerning the abuses of the H2B and H1B systems? Hey, Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz, if you read this site and the comments I challenge you to get a hoppin’ on this!

“The jobs Americans won’t do” mostly means “the jobs Americans won’t do unless we pay them more than we can get cheap illegal (or effectively indentured) labor to do.” Forcing people to train their foreign replacements is atrocious, and has been a minor embarrassment for companies caught doing it (it would be an even greater embarrassment were it not for elite commitment to immigration).

A college education in technical fields is probably still useful, though not as much as it used to be because they can still go out and hire foreigners. The ‘studies”, the humanities, and many social sciences are another matter, and largely function as liberal madrassas. (Most of the Duke activists pushing the fraudulent rape charges against the lacrosse team were in those fields.)

Ted Cruz has been a big supporter of increasing H1B visas in the past, but has turned against them as he has come to see the Brat argument about the effect of mass immigration on employment. Whether or not you believe him now is the question, of course. I suppose with him you at least have a chance.

The ‘studies”, the humanities, and many social sciences are another matter, and largely function as liberal madrassas. (Most of the Duke activists pushing the fraudulent rape charges against the lacrosse team were in those fields.)

It used to be that a firm grounding in the history of Western Civilization and the foundation upon which it is built was considered necessary for anyone claiming to have a higher education.

This is sadly no longer the case. You mention that the modern liberal arts dept. has become a madrassa, but in some ways it is even worse than that. When I was in college every student had to take a course called “Western Civilization” or something close to that. This was a multi-semester course which gave a good outline of our past. Sadly, the faculty voted to discontinue this course about 15 years ago.

We are raising legions of ignoramuses

As to Duke, I recall that much of the leftist insanity and pc culture originated in the English dept. I believe it was a Duke English professor who came up with or popularized the idea that racism can only originate from white culture because it is the dominant culture. There can be no black racists as they do not have the power. What a nut, but I still hear this garbage being spouted.

When I was at Purdue, there was no “Western civilization” course requirement. There was merely the requirement for 12-18 hours of humanities or social sciences as a minor (and not even a specific subject). I qualified in both history and economics, including a course on modern European history (which used the same text I had in high school — and I still had a beat-up copy available).

But, as I found out visiting my English teacher for their first course in science fiction (my final semester there), there was a strong leftist trend in that department, at least among the TAs and such.

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